Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Unidentified staff/host (possibly Committee Assistant)]: We're live.

[Unidentified committee member]: Good to have you class. Nope. Alright. It's I can get it. Yeah. You can

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: work on your own.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: Alright. Welcome, everybody, to House Energy and Digital Infrastructure. It's Friday, April 10, and we are here to learn about the universal digital accessibility at Specify. And my name is Kathleen James from Manchester.

[Representative Richard Bailey]: Richard Bailey, loyal two. Chris Morrow, Windham, Windsor Bennington. Michael Southworth, Caledonia two.

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Christopher

[Unidentified committee member]: Howland, Dara Torre. Dara Torre, Washington two.

[Representative Dara Torre (Clerk)]: Dara Torre, I'm Chittenden, 13 Burlington.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: Great. And joining us?

[Jessica (IT Director, Vermont Judiciary)]: Jess from the judiciary.

[Unidentified staff/host (possibly Committee Assistant)]: Super. Peter Morrow from the judiciary. Great.

[Jessica (IT Director, Vermont Judiciary)]: Adam Wood from General Assembly IT.

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Super. Kevin Moore, alleged IT, IT director.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: Great. Alright. So, for the record, we're gonna start with Rick, who will identify himself as well, and we're starting at ground zero in learning about this project.

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Well, Rick Sagal, office of Gluttrop Council. It's good to see you all. It's been a while, madam chair, since I was in

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: I know.

[Unidentified staff/host (possibly Committee Assistant)]: We miss you.

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah. Last session. So this yeah. I'm gonna try to give you all kind of an overview of what's going on. We can get very technical. I'm not gonna do that because, frankly, I wouldn't be able to speak to how technical this gets, but I think I can give you a snapshot of what's going on so you can then decide how you want to either make recommendations or have people back for testimony. But that's my plan for today, and I can hopefully answer some questions if you have any about the federal rule or the state's interpretation of that rule. Great. Alright. So I have a fun little PowerPoint that I made, and it's fun because I used the colors, at least on the first page. When you when you look at the the title of the rule, as, know, people kind of eyes gloss over when they see federal rule, so I wanna kinda make it exciting. So it's the new federal rule on web content and mobile app accessibility. This was a rule that the federal government, Department of Justice, issued April 2024. So under the Biden administration, they issued this rule, and they've given states and local governments a couple of years to adhere to the rule, and I'll talk about what that rule is here in a second. Okay. The actual full title of the rule is nondiscrimination on the basis of disability, accessibility of web information in service of state and local government entities. It's a lot. That's the rule. And I actually have, just to kinda show you what the rule is, it is this. And it's three roughly 300 pages of this. Okay. So I can just read it if you want, or I can give you I did not read every word. I will tell you that. Synopsis is good. Synopsis is good. So and again, gets very technical, which you want. A rule should be technical. It's a point of rules. You make statutes, then it's up to the agencies to kind of fine tune that to make it work, so to speak. Alright. So back to my little presentation here. When the rule was issued, 04/24/2024, they gave public entities, which includes that we're in the so we're in the title two of the Americans with Disabilities Act. That's the law for this rule scamming fund. Okay? So you have this very famous Americans with Disabilities Act. Title two of that act applies to state and local governments. So this rule applies to state and local governments, and that's why we're here today. So a public entity, a public entity can be a school district, it could be the state of Vermont, it could be the Department of Transportation. It could be any one of those things and more. Right? With a population of more than 50,000 must be in compliance with this new rule on or before April 24, so a couple weeks, actually, two weeks from today. Right? Is my math right? Yes. While entity under 50,000 have an extra year, 04/26/2027. That's because some smaller entities may have more trouble, having the money to update their systems and so forth, so they're given an extra year. So the rule, in general, requires compliance with what's called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG, it's the acronym, 2.1 Level AA. So this is an entity. It's show you their this is the guidelines. W three is the shorthand for the World Wide Web Consortium. This is a nonpartisan international group that comes up with these guidelines every so often, and they update them like this version 2.1. So these are, you know, people that know design, that know the way apps, websites are designed, and they make recommendations on how to make them accessible. We are talking about the Americans with Disabilities Act because that act does require that people with various forms of disabilities be able to access state local government, right? So that's why you have wheelchair ramps, that's why you have elevators, that's why you have various things that state local governments must provide, but it also carries over to technology. So if someone with a visual impairment, who wants to go to the state website and learn about, the project dashboard the ADS has, right? So they should be able to read that or be able to hear it in some other way.

[Representative Michael "Mike" Southworth]: That's what

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: we're kinda getting at here, is that a website and application should be accessible to people who may otherwise have trouble reading it or getting that information. So the rule applies to kind of two groups. Web content is the much bigger group. Web content is defined in the rule as the information and experiences available on the web, like text, images, sound, videos, and documents. Also includes mobile apps. This also so it's not just vermont.gov. It's also Facebook and other social media platforms that a public entity may use to spread this information. So if if Vermont uses Facebook, which, of course, they do to share information about new laws or whatever they, you know, wanna do, that share, that post, that information must be accessible per these rules. Mobile application, same thing. If a state is having uses a third party app provider, app publisher to provide state information, that also must adhere to the rule. Questions so far about the scope of the rule? Okay. So the maybe the I will leave the technical aspects of what the rule requires, but think about font size, think about colors, think about links being underlined. There's very technical things that websites will have to use in order to meet these rules, and I'm not the expert for that. I can there are tools. In fact, I have a couple here where you can pop in a this is their own website. This w3.org. They have a list of tools that you can use to check whether your website is compliant. And I would highly suggest a state entity, local government entity that's watching this that is curious if their website complies is to use one of these because it's at least one tool, and there's there's a lot of them. I think I tried this one, the accessibilitychecker.org. Yeah.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: I have a question about that tool. How would a state entity or, like, a school district or something know how good these different tools are? Like, it just are they all of high quality?

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Or So this is well, it's a good question. This is from the Worldwide Consortium website. I'm sure they have have selected web accessibility evaluation tools. They don't endorse any specific products. You know, your models may vary. One tool may say you're in compliance, the next one says you're not. Now, are some they tag these with the guidelines. So the the rule is WCHE 2.1. So two point o is a previous version that is not enough. Right? 2.1 adds I'm not sure what it adds, but it does add some more requirements to your to your website or content. So maybe another witness can kinda give you answers as to how to compare the tools. I don't know.

[Representative Richard Bailey]: Yeah. Yeah.

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Also wanna show you the state of Vermont website. So UDAP is what you call this presentation, which is fine, but that is what the state of Vermont has called their own executive branch, has titled their own work on this. So they call the state of Vermont Universal Digital Accessibility Project. That's not a federal term. That is the state of Vermont term, And they have a very good website on the communications and marketing office domain that is an attempt to provide not just the public, but also other entities within state government to here's a checklist. Here's what you should do. Here's what you need to give us to make sure that we're all in compliance together. They provide updates. They provide, contact information. So, if you Google State of Vermont UDAB, you'll find this webpage, but it's it's pretty helpful, I think, to see what the states do particularly. Okay. Back to my presentation. There are exceptions to the rule, which is gonna be kind of what is maybe the most I don't know, argued about, but probably the most contentious of this, because there are penalties. If you're on compliance, technically, several thousand dollars, the state could be fined if you're not in compliance. Not that they would do that without warning you. Hopefully, get a letter saying, hey, town of Plainfield, you are not in compliance. Your website's out of compliance. You are subject to a x dollar fine unless you Right. So but there are fines that could be assessed if you don't meet the rule. Okay. So one group of exceptions is archived web content. This is content created before the date that you must comply. So let's say it's April 24, or reproduces paper documents or the contents of other physical media, audio tapes, film negatives CD ROMs that were created before the government must comply. That's part one. These are all required to be considered exempt. The content is kept only for reference, research, record keeping, and the content is kept in a special area for archived content, and the content has not been changed since it was archived. That's key. So if you have this archived piece of a website or a blog post that's on your web page that was made in 2022, if you update it with a new name or with a new picture, that's no longer archived. That is now a new document that must adhere to the rule. So they it's not easy. But they're they must be seriously archived and not touched. Mhmm. Okay. Preexisting, this is another group of exempt documents. Preexisting, conventional, electronic documents. So these are your Word docs, PDFs, presentations like this. Right? They were available on the state or local government's website or mobile app before the date the government must apply. So, again, these documents can't be updated, presumably. Right? They're it's a PDF. It's a doc, and then it's done. So those documents are not live. So get they're given a different kind of set of rules that they are on the website. They don't have be updated because they were made for the rule. Get content posted by a third party where the third party is not posting due to contractual licensing or other arrangements with a public entity. So third parties sometimes post content on state and local government's websites or mobile apps. Think about comments. I don't know why you'd allow but comments on a government website. Third parties are members of the public or others who are not controlled or acted by the government. They may not be able to chance for the content of the post. So I can't give you many examples, but if it's out of the government's control, then obviously you can't change it. You can't update it to be compliance. Another exception, individualized documents that are password protected. These are word processing documents, presentations, PDFs, or spreadsheet files, and they are about a specific person, property, or account, and they are password protected or otherwise secured. So those are seen as more private and not public facing as other documents would be. This is big one. Preexisting social media posts. So the government will not have to go back in time and update your social media posts nor will Facebook or any other social media platform, Instagram, to ensure that those posts meet the new rule standards. You may want testimony from these other third party providers that are common to ask them, like, are you all in compliance? Like, are you by default? Is if the state of Vermont posts on Facebook, is that already compliant? Probably is.

[Representative Richard Bailey]: I don't know the answer to that question.

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Undue burden exception. State local governments do not need to take actions that would result in fundamental alteration or an undue burden. Determining what is fundamental or undue is different from entity to entity. So this is, I think, rare. This sounds like an easy out of the news. I think you have to really show that, hey, making this change will require millions of dollars or something. Right? We don't have access to this website. We this is gonna be a huge problem for us to do this. So the government may say, okay. Maybe if it's not really something the public would look at, if it's not a dynamic content, maybe that's an undue burden, right? So case by case basis. Okay. In some limited situations, state and local governments may be able to show their web content or apps do not meet the standard in a way that is so minor that it would not change a person with a disability's access to the content or overlap. So there's an example here. A state's web page with information about park that is text with a color contrast that is 4.45 to one. Again, what does that mean? I don't know. It's some kind of, like, able to see maybe, like, black text over white background. That's maybe the best. I'm just saying. Instead of black text over gray background, I'm guessing that's what's going on here, instead of the requirement of 4.5 to one. So 4.45 to one is not a compliance. However, that very small difference in color contrast probably would not change whether most people with vision disabilities could read the text. If the state can prove the difference in color contrast is so small that it would not make it harder for people with disabilities to access narration, the state would not violate the rule. So if you have a few of those things, probably not a big deal, but if the entire website is, like, barely out of compliance, that could be a problem that the federal government may not like. So that's my presentation to the rule, kind of what we're looking at. And I think the the committee's having this hearing because you want to see if the state is prepared for the April 24 deadline, and I'll surely let them speak to that. I do wanna share a couple more links. A lot of my analysis came from the ADA's website that has a nice little fact sheet about and has more examples that I didn't include, you know, just that are helpful for people to understand how it works. So I put that idea to Alex, so she'll post it on my testimony for today. I showed you the state website. I showed you the these are the web content guidelines. Again, very technical. But this is what you have to these this is what you have to meet, these guidelines. I showed you the the tools as well that I imagine some of your sub governments are already using the check. I hope they are. So and then kinda happy to answer questions, but that's the overview.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: That's really helpful. Does anybody have questions for Rick?

[Representative Richard Bailey]: That's it. No problem. Thanks. Yeah. Is it mostly with the contrast between the background and the lettering?

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: That's just one thing. You know? Captions so closed captioning. Again, I'm not the best to answer

[Representative Richard Bailey]: this, but Yeah.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: I I think our next witnesses are gonna tell us a little bit more about the details of what they're doing. Yeah.

[Representative Richard Bailey]: Do you have any sense for how compliance and enforcement are going to be executed?

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I don't just to be because it's it's not really in effect yet. Right? We don't know how aggressive and this is also a Biden DOJ. Now you have the Trump DOJ. It's hard to back off a rule. It takes work to issue a new rule. That's one thing. Like, if the Trump administration wants to undo this, they would have to spend time, and it's probably too late. It's gonna take effect. So answer your question. It depends on how aggressive DOJ is gonna be on going after these entities that are noncompliance. I don't know the answer to

[Representative Richard Bailey]: that question. Is truth social in compliance? I don't know. I don't know.

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Alright. They they I guess they would need to be if you don't need to post on there. Right?

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah.

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: To the president but the president is not a state of local government. So but, yeah, I I actually don't I actually don't know the federal government's current if what their standard is. I don't know. Maybe one of the witnesses can tell you that. This is just for state and local governments.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: Okay. Yeah. Mike Southworth?

[Representative Michael "Mike" Southworth]: Do you have any sense of any red flags as far as state components?

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: That I can't ask for.

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: Yeah.

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I would not know. I think that's maybe question you should ask for the people that are working on it. Okay.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: Great. So we have we're gonna talk today to the legislative and judicial branches, and then we have the state of Vermont coming in next week. Super. Alright. Alright. Well, hang around for a bit.

[Unidentified committee member]: Hang around for

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: a little bit. Take some questions.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: Alright. Sounds good. Yeah. Okay. Who's Kevin, are

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: you next? Let's see this meeting. Okay. This small

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Do you see the couple? Yep.

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: Good afternoon. For the record, Kevin Moore, director of ITU for the general assembly. Wrote a memo, so I brought hard copies. Anybody would like a Yes.

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I figured you'd take

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: one back. I'm gonna do my best not to read off them.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: Okay.

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: Because I don't I don't like dealing with that. So generally speaking, this is start this isn't new to any IT environment that operates at the state or municipal levels. Accessibility is always top of mind for an organization such as ours when we're doing development. So

[Jessica (IT Director, Vermont Judiciary)]: this

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: is more of an evolution of something we're already doing and something that we don't anticipate any real friction with from our perspective. For a while now, legislative IT has been focused on a project to ensure websites and digital content meet the ADA title two, and we say WCAG, w c a g, 2.1 a a standards. It's been a close collaboration with the Office of Legislative Counsel, not Rick specifically, but another legislative counsel, to make sure that we're checking, all the right boxes and fulfill fulfilling our legal obligations. We use specialized tools much like what, Rick was just talking about. We use a suite of tools, both free and paid, for this because no one tool is gonna give you all of the answers. It's really what it comes down to. I can't speak to the individual specifics, but I brought somebody with me. If you want those answers, I'm sure they can help. Great. So let's see. So it gives us technical oversight that we need. It allows us to routinely and continuously audit our sites, proactively and passively, to address any non compliant elements that we find from automated scans. Now we, small IT shop with a small, internet facing footprint, do rely heavily on automation, in our our operation. That does not mean it's gonna catch everything. And so manual checks are still part of this process. So for us, manual checks are, oh, you you all check our content all the time. We have members of the public that check our content all the time. We have lobbyists, advocates, you name it. They're always checking our content in addition to us. So we rely on that feedback to make sure that we're always in compliance. I can't remember we generally cannot remember the last time we've had a compliance complaint about any of our web web content, which is fantastic. In the event that we have a compliance complaint, we immediately take action. There is space in the rule. I'm sure Rick can speak to it about the grace period when you have a complaint. I wanna say it's somewhere in the forty eight to seventy two hour range, forty eight hours, to be able to turn that content back around and make it accessible. For example, if part of our prior bienniums, which are archived portions of our website, have content that is now relevant and being accessed and is noncompliant, somebody could let us know and say, hey. We're using this again, or we get it flagged as no longer archived content. Okay. And we have forty eight hours to update that into something that's completed.

[Representative Richard Bailey]: When

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: you say it's automated, can you remind me a little bit about what that actually means? So do you have a widget It back behind the website somewhere that's

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: An entire software platform that we're using. I try not to name vendor products specifically on the record for all the reasons. I wanted to talk about that off the record, but it is a industry, standard, and it is a tool, frankly, that the Department of Justice is using to audit us back. So we're using very similar tool sets, and it's an entire platform where there the industry that it that it is does nothing but ADA compliance, web accessibility, things of that nature. The platform that we're also that we're using also has representation on the w three c counting. So they're very, very well equipped.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: Is it continually monitoring? Or is it monitoring and fixing?

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: No. We have to fix. It can't fix. No. That's us. That's Adam, mostly. Okay. And so what it does is it does routine scans based off of a template that we set, or for us to go through and manually kick off a scan depending on what we're doing. So for example, once a week, one of our tools will go through and scrape all of our websites, scan everything. And then it'll bring up issues and say, hey, this this element or this portion of the page is, has an error. Please address this. And by doing so, it'll bring you to this level of compliance out of a 100. What Adam would do at that point is fix that element, figure out what that impact looks like across the entirety of the website, because one piece one piece being fixed can potentially affect thousands of pages. So you can have, an outsized benefit of fixing some what seems like something seemingly small, but it's replicated across every single page, whether it's a header or a footer or a portion of the website that is common, it can then boost your score quite quickly. In comparison to something that's more complex, it might individually bring you up more on a point basis, but it isn't replicated across the site, for example. And so we're, prioritizing based off of what keeps our score the highest at all times to make sure that we are the highest level of compliance, the highest level of impact of the time and effort being put into it, which, again, is pretty standard for our operation. It's nothing out of the.

[Unidentified committee member]: Can can you just give us a few more examples besides color contrast with things we're talking about? Underlined hyperlink? I will do my

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: best again, and Adam's gonna keep me honest. So things such as images in the background can sometimes mess with the ability to read. And so that's a color contrast issue, but it's not the same as the background color, for example. It could be a image on your website doesn't have an alternate description, an alt text description. So when somebody's using a screen reader, it goes through. It doesn't have a description of what that image is. It it's a violation. Another one that Rick mentioned, hyperlinks. We've had a website that was designed original design, not to I know. I've heard of it recently. It was about ten years ago, the original design. It's gone through many, many evolution since. But it was ADA compliant at that point in time. Well, it only made our hyperlinks blue, which was the standard at the time. Well, the new standard, the one that we have to comply with, you have to have two elements to identify that as a as a hyperlink. So we've now underlined them as the second element. There's spacing between certain elements that are required. For example, the footer of our website. You may have seen it. We've gotten some complaints. Things look different. There's something weird. Nope. It's just us complying with federal, rules and federal law. But there's certain spacing that you have to deal with. The way, web page elements have to flow with screen reader. Headers have different what's the word I'm looking for here? Weight. Weight. Thank you. Different weight as you're working down through the page. It it doesn't want to go from the top of the page to the middle of the page back to the the somewhere above the middle of the page and back, it's gotta flow logically in the way that natural reading would otherwise occur. And those website elements inform tools such as screen readers. Is that helpful?

[Unidentified committee member]: That is helpful. Thank you.

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: As mentioned previously Daily. Sorry. Yeah. And how how often are you seeing these? Are they daily? So as far as what we do for repair Yeah. Adam's done a full time job. He has several pages and sites he's responsible for, so he's always in the website code. Now as an organization, this website has three ish dozen, what you would call content creators for. It's a lot of people to think about, uploading content to. So the reality of staying perfectly compliant at all times is slip. That's just not reality. So we're not gonna be a 100% compliant at all times. There's too many people uploading stuff, too many witnesses from, outside entities that are coming in with non compliant content. But what we can do is we can scan periodically, which is what we do against part of our standard tempo, and then flag any new issues, and then address those based off of that prioritization again. One of the benefits of the tool that we have acquired for this project specifically is, ultimately, what we'll be able to do is assign, for example, committee information pages. Issues with the content of, for example, this committee, your information page, could then be filtered over to your committee assistant, and that committee assistant can then be empowered to pull that content down, fix it for accessibility purposes, and then repost it. That's not something we're doing today. It's not necessary based off of where we are, but it is an option that we are considering going forward, again, due to the volume of content creators we have for this very dynamic website.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: So all the testimony that's posted as a PDF every single day across this building?

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: So one of the things we have to keep in mind is what is, exempt by rule, what is, something that needs to be checked, so on and so forth. So anything that is prior biennium, we're not actively looking at. Right. By by rule is allowed to remain archived at this point. Anything that is in the current biennium, we're actively scanning. So we are PDF heavy, PDF dependent on our website. It it creates a lot of technical accessibility, which is fantastic why why we use PDFs, but that does not mean that the content within the PDF is accessible. An example, we use OCR documents. That allows us to be able to move from text component to text component to text component within the document. If somebody were to scan a a written document or image or something of that nature, but they don't scan it with an OCR capable, system, it might scan as just an image. So for example, if you scan if you have, like, an iPhone that's got a scanning feature Mhmm. Right, it's not a really great scan. It is not ADA compliant. A screen reader won't be able to read the contents. You have to be, vision capable in order to read that. So everything that's on the website is being evaluated in the current biennium and going forward. I do mention briefly in my memo further down, I'm gonna skip right to it because it's relevant to what we're talking about. How do we do our best to ensure that before content makes it to the website that it is as compliant as possible? So our office, excuse me, the general assembly, and the offices of the general assembly use very standard software tools for word processing and content creation. Of those tools, they have built in accessibility checkers that our staff can use, which is great. So attorneys will be able to check accessibility within the Microsoft Office suite. Works beautifully. And it'll provide recommendations, very explicit recommendations prior to printing it to PDF, or saving it as PDF that'll allow that content to be accessible. Once it's in PDF form, you also have the ability in many, PDF tools to check for accessibility. And so all of the built in components what we're already using is available for ADA compliance. We will be issuing new guidance to our internal content creators with strong recommendations, because we can impose, but strong recommendations, on how to check for accessibility prior to releasing a two committee. It won't be a huge additional, burden over time. Initially, it's gonna be kind of a headache for folks, because it's an extra step. Right? It's short on time. We have a fire alarm today. You're rushing back to your office. Did I did I hit that ADA check button? I don't know. Right? So they're gonna have that learning curve with our content creators, but that does not solve for people who are outside of our entity. And so we have two different groups, other professional, I'll say witnesses. So for example, executive branch, judicial branches, who submit content to the legislature based off of the guidance that we provide them. And so we'll update that guidance as well, with the technical requirements for, outside, witnesses to, send content. And then you have the general public. Right. Right? And the general public is really the the wild card in in this conversation. So how do we go through and check their content? Well, we could put it on our committee assistance, which are heavily burdened with multiple task people, and that's not a great answer. You have somebody that's gonna come in with content that hasn't been scanned or entered into our system that will do so afterward. So how do we deal with that? Well, what we've done proactively in preparation for this issue, but other issues as well, is we centralized what we call let me make sure I'm reading it correctly here, a witness document upload tool. We always refer to it as the w drive. I'm sure you've heard about that in conversations. The w drive. It's not actually a w drive. This isn't anymore. But it's a programmatic tool that allows us to put checks in line prior to it making to the website. So we're currently evaluating what options we have there, but we anticipate in the not too distant future the ability to integrate a PDF check, an accessibility check, during that upload process that can at least flag it. It doesn't necessarily ban it from the website because we want the conversations to continue. But it's gonna flag it, and then that committee assistant can either kick it back to the witness. The committee can kick it back to the witness. Or whatever that person level process looks like, we can be able to make sure that that content is accessible going forward.

[Representative Michael "Mike" Southworth]: Yeah. Would there be any way that it could convert it to ADA adjustments?

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: That would be likely a case by case basis. So it depends on what the content is. It depends on the quality of it getting to us. It'd be hard to say yes with certainty, and it's certainly not no with certainty.

[Representative Richard Bailey]: Thank you.

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: You know, I really touched a lot of it. So I'll point you to the chart on my the first page of our memo that we're presenting here. So we've been, for the longest time, working with WCAG 2.1 level a. It's just just a touch below a a because that was the standard at the time. You'll see that we've maintained consistently across our two public facing websites. Those are the important part here as well. Public facing websites in general assembly, we've maintained an 85 to 95 out of 100 score pretty consistently. And the same is true for the JFO website. The baseline score, once we converted that to level AA for the general assembly, dropped at about five points. And then you'll see that it was about three point drop, give or take, on the JFO website. Still pretty high level compliance. You'll see that we've already made some significant progress on those efforts, moving it up to a higher level of compliance. You'll see as of this writing, which is actually not today, it was I didn't need it for today because my testimony is today. It's a couple days ago. As of that writing, we're at 89 out of a 100 compliance for general assembly, and 83 out of a 100 for JFO. And that is purely because we've been focusing on the general assembly site as of late. The JFO site has made some jumps prior to. You'll see issues remediated. It doesn't look like a lot. There's 20 plus on the general assembly, 10 plus on the JFO site. It's a lot. There are some significant structural adjustments that Adam made that, again, went across thousands of pages of our website. It's a very, very deep, website even if you say just within the current biennium. We start going into the prior biennium. It's deeper and deeper. We have a number here. It's called the industry benchmark. Where do we source this number? This number is sourced specifically from that tool I mentioned previously. So this is that more comprehensive tool being used by the Department of Justice to audit us back. We're using it to audit us prior to the deadline. And this is that again, that same organization that had representation on w three c counts. So their industry benchmark, this is against other government entities that are, going against the same rule. They're averaging about 84.8 out of a 100 points, with compliance to the level AA standard. And then you'll see title two level a a target is indeed a 100%. As I mentioned previously, with such a dynamic website, the reality is we're never gonna be perfectly compliant forever. We may have moments of 100% compliance. Our goal is to ensure that anytime that there's an element that is out of compliance or we receive a complaint about accessibility, that we turn that around within forty eight hours within that rule, and we're able to provide accessibility, whether that is to the physical content or to the website itself, for the individuals within that time frame. That is our our absolute goal and our commitment and has always been our commitment.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah. That

[Representative Michael "Mike" Southworth]: time frame self imposed, or is that the time frame that you're obligated to do?

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: That is the time frame we are obligated to do. Speaking, if it's something minor, we can do it in moments. It's it's not something that takes hours or days.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: We have any other questions for Kevin? Yeah. Well,

[Unidentified committee member]: my question's not actually about accessibility. I asked a question about other types of scanning that Sure. Know we had an issue at the nonprofit I worked with with copyright infringements and PDFs of PowerPoints that other people have How does that is that an issue?

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: It's a periodic issue. Yes. So, again, very dynamic website. And so we, led by IT, do not audit nor have control over what you all upload to the website at any given point. So we have guidelines, strong recommendations. And part of those strong recommendations is to make sure we don't have copyrighted content put up, but it happens sometimes. Or somebody, a witness, a member of the public typically will submit content to the committee not realizing that it's gonna be publicly posted, and then, in theory, archived with the Ron Sibilia Archives and Records Administration. We get those levels of complaints and feedback as well. We work diligently and quickly with the office of the foot council. Every single time that we receive any of those notices or complaints, we will proactively flag that content and pull it offline, just to ensure during that evaluation period, we're not causing additional harm that, somebody might be feeling or otherwise, expressing, and we're not doing anything in addition with copyright infringement. Yeah. Once that is evaluated, we'll receive a legal opinion based off of that, and it'll give us directive to either pull the content or keep the content or alter the content, such as redactions or or trimming or silencing a video clip if you're all listening to copywritten music or record, for example. Oh, anybody

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: else? Yeah. Brave.

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: How big is your team that works on these two websites, JFO and Ledge? We have one dedicated dedicated web developer, We have a very small team. Now, I will say, we have a very capable overall team, and we all wear many, many hats along the way. So Adam is not completely left alone. He is not dealing with the entirety of the code base by himself, the entirety of the infrastructure by himself. He does the the primary development and remediation work. And for break fix scenarios, we work with our team collectively. And for future development, we actually have a third party retained currently that is working on the user interface and user design, user experience of the soon to be new JFO website. Thank you. It depends on the scenario. We will absolutely bring in, something else for our business. And thank you. Adam does a phenomenal job. I wanna say he does a absolutely phenomenal job. We we used to do it all with contractors. The turnaround time has never been accepted. It's just the reality. So we will back build with contractors now instead of make them harder.

[Unidentified committee member]: Great. Great.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: So Oh, yeah.

[Representative Richard Bailey]: We're So if this if there's this number is not a 100, you have a potential

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: to We have a potential liability. The level of that liability is always subject to, interpretation. Okay. Alright.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: Okay. Thanks so much, Kevin. It was really informative.

[Jessica (IT Director, Vermont Judiciary)]: Alright. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Jessica. I am the IT director for infrastructure and technology support services, the judiciary.

[Nita Moloff (General Counsel, Vermont Judiciary)]: And I'm Nita Moloff, general counsel at the Vermont judiciary.

[Jessica (IT Director, Vermont Judiciary)]: Alright. So, Kevin, thank you for explaining fantastically to the point one a k. We, as judiciary, are in a different spot than you folks are. We can control the content on our public facing sites. For the most part, we do have some vendors that control Tyler technologies, such as our portal and our e file and our internal portal. And they have assured us that they will be substantially compliant, I believe, by the deadline for all of that. We have a couple other smaller vendors that also have assured us that we will they will be substantially compliant. Our website is moving from we have a similar similar situation. The response time is not great. It's either this weekend or early next week, the website is moving to on premises hosting, which will give us a bit more control over the website's content and remediation. We currently stand at a 94, so we're not too bad with compliance with the new guideline, and we hope to to push that up. Our website is a modular website, so we're able to actually force people to be compliant before they post content, which is a really big benefits. One one thing that our website also has, we are very PDF heavy, but more so for forms. We have lots of forms for individuals who are doing court filings, and those seem to

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: be very

[Jessica (IT Director, Vermont Judiciary)]: complex, and it has been a challenge with some of them. Some one form I had had 270 something fields that needed to be filled out. Those 270 something fields need descriptions. They need to be in a structured format so that people can tap through it, that any images need to be compliant as well with descriptions. We don't have a lot of images of our forms, thankfully. So we are working towards that. We have either a vendor that we're gonna use, but we have some in house capabilities as well to remediate those forms. I'll probably move to you for the compliance plan. Yeah. All the

[Unidentified committee member]: time. I just have a bit.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah. Excuse me. Just a basic question as a reminder to myself, which is that the judiciary website is you guys are an independent website. You are not part of the state of Vermont's work. You are doing your own you maintain your own separate website. You are doing your own compliance work. And so what the state of Vermont is doing in terms of its UDAP work is separate and different from your

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: work. Okay.

[Nita Moloff (General Counsel, Vermont Judiciary)]: And we did submit to the committee our draft digital accessibility compliance plan. So it's something we're still working on within the judiciary, but we thought it could be helpful to give an overview of where all the rules this rule was touching, sort of what is our inventory led us to, which is getting to some of the questions you were asking as well about what does this mean and what are the implications across our website and content. And so our plan describes the work that we've done internally within the judiciary. We do have a working group that we developed last fall that has gotten together to really think through where are all the places this rule touches because it's pretty broad. There's our website, but then there's everything that's on our website. And then there's also things that are housed within our vendors. And as a group, we've put together a plan. We've also been in touch with the digital accessibility steering committee within the executive branch. They've been an amazing resource. They have a great website. And so that's been helpful to us as well. Within our plan, we've tried to identify what are the high priority areas, areas where members of the public are really interacting with the information on a regular basis. And that's why the court forms are such a high priority for us to make sure that they're accessible to members of the public that are using them to access court services. And on our this may be more information than we want, but in our plan, we really are trying to set forth comprehensively what are all the places this rule is touching. Yes, it includes court forms, but it also includes things like training. What training is needed for people within the judiciary to do their job, to, from the outset, have materials be as successful as possible to sort of get out of a remediation loop where we're fixing things that are there, but then what happens the next time a court forum needs an adjustment? So to really have the the in house knowledge to do everything as well as possible and to make sure we're being transparent with members of the public. So included in our plan, we have a draft statement. We're planning on enhancing our website statement to be able to give any members of the public a place to go if they have feedback, if they are unable to access content away for them to get their needs met so we can address it as soon as possible. Another piece of this is just thinking through working with members of the community to provide feedback to us or to do testing to make sure we're really addressing the needs of the people who this rule is intended to impact and to help.

[Jessica (IT Director, Vermont Judiciary)]: I will add, we got a help desk request while we were in this committee for accessibility for someone's court documents, 400 page court document. So that will take a little bit of time. The public is familiar with the proposed process, which is great, which is to reach out to our help desk. And then similarly to the legislative needs, we are implementing ongoing scanning of our websites. I'm just showing that, I'll show you guys too. The tools that we're using to ensure that even if stuff gets past our compliance block, that we can ensure that we're auditing ourselves before we get audited by other agencies.

[Nita Moloff (General Counsel, Vermont Judiciary)]: I'd say we also really think of this as a dynamic process. So we're learning as we go along, what do we need to do? This is work we've done for years, but how can we keep being better? And so something even like our planet is something I would expect would continue to evolve as we learn what can we improve and how can we meet the public's needs as best as possible.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: Yeah. Perhaps, Seth?

[Representative Michael "Mike" Southworth]: So there's one term that you stated that kind of threw up a red flag for me. Sure. Substantially compliant. So that concerns me. And I guess I'd just like to you to explain what that means versus being

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: I would love to spell it.

[Nita Moloff (General Counsel, Vermont Judiciary)]: We have been in discussion with we have some primary vendors that the judiciary partners with that provide a lot of support. So for example, our case management system, payment system, they are all important components of how the judiciary does its work. We've been in touch with our vendors to say, what are you doing in order to comply with this rule? And I think the vendors are also figuring out what they need to do. And so for them, it's an ongoing process. For us, it's gonna be an ongoing process of compliance over time. And so they've let us know they expect to be compliant. I think there's still work that some of our vendors are going to be doing too. One thing we're looking to understand better is when the judiciary is putting documents into our case management system, even if we create them as accessible, what happens in the process of putting them in that tool? Does it maintain the accessibility or is there continued work we need to do with the vendor to understand what their capabilities are? And I think to me, that's an ongoing discussion with our vendors. And as we get closer to the deadline to understand from them where are they at with the advancements and developments that they needed to do as well.

[Representative Michael "Mike" Southworth]: And will they have any deadlines on furthering their compliance?

[Nita Moloff (General Counsel, Vermont Judiciary)]: What do you mean

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: by that?

[Representative Michael "Mike" Southworth]: Whether they're being substantially compliant where they would be more compliant than not, I guess is a good way to put it.

[Nita Moloff (General Counsel, Vermont Judiciary)]: Yeah. Well, to me, I think we've all talked about the difficulty of being 100% compliant to this. So everyone's making a best effort. We this is important work. I think being to a level of substantial compliance is pretty good. I think that means they're doing what they can to meet the requirements of this. Maybe they'll be continuing improvements over time just like there will be for all of us as You're

[Representative Michael "Mike" Southworth]: in a comfortable zone with what they're doing. Okay.

[Nita Moloff (General Counsel, Vermont Judiciary)]: Yeah. I think there needs to be think we should be in communication with all of our vendors about this too. I think there's also a lot of rapidly developing technology in these areas too that'll hopefully keep making things better and just having more awareness of this need, I think, is really important.

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: Thank you.

[Representative Richard Bailey]: There expenditure for all this work being done that wasn't anticipated?

[Nita Moloff (General Counsel, Vermont Judiciary)]: Potentially. I think we're doing whatever we can to keep the cost as low as possible. And so part of that is thinking through where the where's the biggest impact? How what can we learn in house? So maybe we need to get expert help to figure out how to do it, but what can we bring in house and teach ourselves in house to do the same work? But there's potentially some training needs and some of the remediation work in other causes.

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Yeah. Seems like potentially

[Unidentified committee member]: that AI could prove useful in this sort of thing. Is that accurate or

[Jessica (IT Director, Vermont Judiciary)]: not so much? Right one is used and if it's used appropriately. We had attempted to utilize some tools to identify things that had made it worse. I'm sure your experience was the same. So I think it could be used, but I just don't think there are the tools out there that

[Representative Richard Bailey]: we could get to work with.

[Nita Moloff (General Counsel, Vermont Judiciary)]: And even if we can, to the extent we can utilize technology, which we would wanna do for efficiency's sake, there still needs to be some manual work around making sure. That it does what we are hoping it does.

[Representative Richard Bailey]: This may be a question for Rick, actually. Is 300 pages of regs that he read and memorized. So, you know, we've talked about making sites more accessible to people with visual impairments. Do the are the regs designed to make websites more accessible to people with other sorts of disabilities besides visual?

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: So I'll I'll go ahead and answer my colleague's certain thing also. Now we're still talking about the ADA, right? So we're talking not just visual of all kinds of, impairments. Yeah. When it comes to design, it tends to be visual, but it could be audio. It could be, other forms of disabilities. Like, I've mentioned earlier the the captioning, video should have captioning, images should have the alt text on it. Other than that, I I would have trouble coming up with, you know, things that would affect someone on a website, but maybe

[Nita Moloff (General Counsel, Vermont Judiciary)]: Well, I'll share one thing for all of us to keep thinking about is just to have plain language. So to make things as clear as possible, as understandable as possible, that's an ongoing work, and I think really important work for all of us, but especially and not just people with disabilities to make it easier for everyone to use, but that's another best practice I know that a lot of courts are thinking about, especially the things like work forms that can be pretty tense.

[Representative Richard Bailey]: And I'm wondering about people with limited use of hand and fingers. Keyboard keyboard navigation is important to be able to tab, arrow keys Yeah. And things

[Jessica (IT Director, Vermont Judiciary)]: it says navigate menus and Right.

[Unidentified committee member]: Website. To not

[Nita Moloff (General Counsel, Vermont Judiciary)]: use them, if you're not using the mouse. So yeah.

[Representative Richard Bailey]: Seems to me that probably also some mental disabilities that website design could make easier or worse. Look. I mean, someone with attention deficit disorder, websites with stuff popping up and flashing could be distracting from the work they're trying to do and things like that. Just wondered if that was addressed on page two sixty three.

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: I don't know that specifically, but again, we are under the Americans with Disabilities Act and it covers a wide range of impairments. And I can get back to you specifically on that. Like if you're curious about, you know, visual, other visual things that may affect someone that's not having an impairment, but maybe, like you said, epilepsy, some type of like other underlying condition. Yeah. You don't need to get back

[Kevin Moore (Director of IT, Vermont General Assembly)]: to me. The question came to mind, and I

[Representative Richard Bailey]: would imagine with 300 pages of regs, they've addressed quite a few areas.

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Mean, I they used to make the the mouse the you know, twenty years, you'd have websites with a mouse who have the trail on it. You know, as you move the mouse around Right. Or music would begin get and playing. These are things I'm guessing are noncompliance with the Yeah. 2.1 or maybe two point o on this rule of this standard. Thank you. Yeah. Well, thank you.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: I was just looking through we had a member of the public sent some questions in that I I don't have their permission to post yet. I I don't think people always assume that everything they send is gonna be, you know, made public comment. So I I was waiting to hear back, and I haven't yet. But I'll forward those to you once I have once I have permission just to to get your thoughts. I think some might have revolved around a a confusion that the judiciary website was part of the state of Vermont project. But they did ask, and this this was actually an interesting question for me. Couple questions I wanted to make sure I understood. Sounds like the e file system has a multi factor authentication requirement that would then require the filer to have a phone. So I don't know. I've never refiled. I'm not familiar with your website really at all. But I would assume that having or not having access to a phone would be a barrier you might want to address, but I'm not sure that's like a protected class.

[Jessica (IT Director, Vermont Judiciary)]: Yeah. It wouldn't be a protected class. I don't think. But also the e file system is mainly used by lawyers. And it's it's maintained. It's a vendor maintained web site. And the multi factor authentication is a best practice. You don't want somebody filing something on your behalf because they happen to guess your password and your username. Gotcha. Which could be, you know, oh, I motioned to dismiss this case and you didn't want that to happen. So that would be a a a very important thing to keep multi factor authentication. And I think it's, you know, phone for phone call or push authentication. Sometimes multi factor authentication can even be through email as well.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: K. And then just a question about the general accessibility of the public portal, which I also don't I've never been on your website before. So what is it? How is it used? And then it looks like it takes you to a third party site and there's kind of disclaimer that says like, we're not responsible for the content here.

[Jessica (IT Director, Vermont Judiciary)]: Yeah. So the public portal is another vendor maintained site. We host it on premises and it's utilized by litigants and lawyers to access their cases. Sometimes it's used by other branches of government to access case records, such as children and families would be able to look at all the cases that children and families is involved with. The site is being replaced with two new cloud hosted sites. The disclaimer that you're talking about is actually when someone logs into the site. So it goes to our vendor's website to provide authentication and comes back to us. That's where that disclaimer shows up.

[Unidentified committee member]: Okay. Does anybody

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: have any other questions? Great questions. Great. Alright, thanks for your time.

[Representative Richard Bailey]: Appreciate it.

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: Thank you. Appreciate it. You.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: Folks. We are done for the day, and I think Alex is pretty deep into the next week's agenda, so we'll get it posted probably before she leaves for the

[Rick Sagal (Office of Legislative Counsel)]: day. Alright.

[Representative Kathleen James (Chair)]: We can go off live. Thanks, everybody.